Recently in Performances

It might seem churlish to complain about the BBC Proms coverage of Pierre
Boulez’s 90th anniversary. After all, there are a few performances
dotted around — although some seem rather oddly programmed, as if embarrassed
at the presence of new or newish music. (That could certainly not be claimed in
the present case.)

I recently spent four days in St. Petersburg, timed to coincide with the
annual Stars of the White Nights Festival. Yet the most memorable singing I
heard was neither at the Mariinsky Theater nor any other performance hall. It
was in the small, nearly empty church built for the last Tsar, Nicholas II, at
Tsarskoye Selo.

As I walked up Exhibition Road on my way to the Royal Albert Hall, I passed a busking tuba player whose fairground ditties were enlivened by bursts of flame which shot skyward from the bell of his instrument, to the amusement and bemusement of a rapidly gathering pavement audience.

‘Here, thanks be to God, my opera is praised to the skies and there is nothing in it which does not please greatly.’ So wrote Antonio Vivaldi to Marchese Guido Bentivoglio d’Aragona in Ferrara in 1737.

When he was skilfully negotiating the not inconsiderable complexities,
upheavals and strife of musical and religious life at the English royal court
during the Reformation, Thomas Tallis (c.1505-85) could hardly have imagined
that more than 450 years later people would be queuing round the block for the
opportunity spend their lunch-hour listening to the music that he composed in
service of his God and his monarch.

Two of the important late twentieth century stage directors, Robert Carsen and Peter Sellars, returned to the Aix Festival this summer. Carsen’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a masterpiece, Sellars’ strange Tchaikovsky/Stravinsky double bill is simply bizarre.

Plus an evening by the superb Modigliani Quartet that complimented the brief (55 minutes) a cappella opera for six female voices Svadba (2013) by Serbian composer Ana Sokolovic (b. 1968). She lives in Canada.

With its revelatory production of Rappaccini’s Daughter performed outdoors in the city’s refurbished Botanical Gardens, Des Moines Metro Opera has unlocked the gate to a mysterious, challenging landscape of musical delights.

Even by Shakespeare’s standards A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of his earlier plays, boasts a particularly fantastical plot involving a bunch of aristocrats (the Athenian Court of Theseus), feuding gods and goddesses (Oberon and Titania), ‘Rude Mechanicals’ (Bottom, Quince et al) and assorted faeries and spirits (such as Puck).

What do we call Tristan und Isolde? That may seem a silly question.
Tristan und Isolde, surely, and Tristan for short, although
already we come to the exquisite difficulty, as Tristan and Isolde themselves partly seem (though do they only seem?) to recognise of that celebrated ‘und’.

So this was it, the Pelléas which had apparently repelled critics and other members of the audience on the opening night. Perhaps that had been exaggeration; I avoided reading anything substantive — and still have yet to do so.

The Metropolitan Opera in New York chose to open its 2013-14 season with a
new production (in cooperation with the English National Opera) of
Tchaikovsky’s most popular vocal work, Eugene Onegin. The production
is a drab and claustrophobic affair — one the Met did not need. It was
mounted for its star soprano, Anna Netrebko, who proved ill-suited to her role
as Tatiana, the teenager who falls in love with the older, caddish Onegin.

The Met’s previous production of Onegin was all light,
atmosphere, and swirling leaves. It surged with passion. The largely empty
stage afforded the dancers — and among the glories of this score are
Tchaikovsky’s dances — with plenty of room to waltz. That previous
production translated well both in the opera house and in the HD simulcast
relay.

In contrast, the current production is cramped and cheap. The entire first
act is played out in some sort of potter’s shed on the Larin estate in
Russia. The stage is cut in half horizontally by a faux glass wall, pushing all
the action to the front of the stage. Through the glass the audience can see
birch trees heavy with green leaves. If only the audience could have been back
there, outdoors with the birches.

The second scene of the first act is pivotal to the plot. It should be set
in Tatiana Larin’s bedroom, where the feverish girl composes her anguished
letter to Onegin confessing her love. Instead, it was played in the same
potter’s shed, with Tatiana finally falling asleep on the floor next to a
rickety table.

The cramped frame of the shed also serves as the scene for the Act Two party
celebrating Tatiana’s name-day. In such a dowdy setting, the famous Waltz
that opens this act went for little because there was no waltzing, just some
foolish stage business with dancers wearing animal masks.

Not until the duel in the second scene of the act, where Onegin kills his
former friend Lenski, does this production begin to rival its predecessor in
atmosphere. The despondent Lenski is sitting on a fallen branch of a birch
tree, from which position he sings his aria Where or where have you gone,
golden days of my youth? The setting is cold, gloomy, and despairing. In
short, it fits.

A little grandeur arrives in Act Three when the action moves to a palace in
St. Petersburg and Tatiana’s new life with her husband, Prince Gremin. Nine
white columns dominate the set, and while they interfere with the dancing
required in the score, at least the costumes rise to the dazzling Met standard.

The last scene, in which Onegin admits to Tatiana that he has been a boob
and begs her to accept him, should be played inside Tatiana’s residence. Here
it is set outside during a St. Petersburg snowstorm. This stage picture would
work splendidly for Tchaikovsky’s other great opera, The Queen of
Spades, for the scene along the Winter Canal when Liza commits suicide in
despair over her gambler boyfriend. But it makes little sense as the finale to
Onegin.

At this point I realized that Netrebko should have been singing Liza (in
The Queen of Spades), and not Tatiana. Liza is an enigmatic character.
The part makes few dramatic demands and it suits her still creamy middle and
upper register. But Netrebko is no Tatiana. She doesn’t have the acting chops
to become a convincing teenager in puppy love. Throughout the first
act, one could see her thinking: “Move the arm here, walk there, look up,
turn the face left.” It was painful.

In the first scene of Act Two Netrebko simply disappeared in the swirl of
the birthday party. Wearing a shapeless dull dress, she could have been a Larin
family servant. Her expression suggested more boredom than unrequited love.

Without an enchanting and believable Tatiana at its center, this opera loses
its considerable charm.

The production did have some nice minor touches. Projections of wheat fields
and forests were effective as curtain raisers. A lovely sunrise awoke Tatiana
from her sleep in the shed. Netrebko actually resembled her sister Olga, which
heightened their relationship. (Olga was performed winningly by a fellow
Russian, Oksana Volkova.) When Onegin is unhinged by seeing how elegant the
adult, married Tatiana has become, he snatches an entire bottle of champagne,
and not just a glass, during the St. Petersburg ball. But these were not many
minutes of pleasure during an opera that stretched to four hours but should
have been three.

At least we had a splendid Lenski in the Polish tenor Piotr Beczala. His
open, handsome, beaming face (at least until Onegin insults him in Act Two)
made him a convincing young lover of Olga. He delivered both his major arias
with beautiful, even tone and ample volume. He had almost enough juice in his
voice to make his cry of the heart in Act Two over Olga’s behavior thrilling,
although both Ramon Vargas and Neil Shicoff were more powerful in this
essential moment.

The Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien has neither the imposing physique nor
the menacing voice to make Onegin the villain he is. Tatiana’s infatuation
with him was hard to understand. His anger didn’t come from his core. He was
Onegin lite. Given Netrebko’s wooden Tatiana, few sparks flew
between the two. Kwiecien at the Met has given a much better account of himself
in comic roles such as Belcore in The Elixir of Love. Perhaps those
parts better suit his personality. In short, bring back Dmitri Hvorostovsky in
this role — forever.

Larissa Diadkova put her veteran, powerful, plummy mezzo to good use as
Tatiana’s nanny, Filippyevna. Every syllabus she sang was filled with Russian
authority.

As Triquet, the French teacher, John Graham-Hall showed a pleasant and
accurate high tenor voice in delivering the little serenade to Tatiana at her
party. Why he was wearing an old-fashioned knee brace that forced him into some
awkward postures (I feared for his aching back) was never made clear in the
production. The brace was so big that at first I thought he was on stilts.

Elena Zaremba has little to do as Tatiana’s mother, but she did it well
and with her usual elegance. Alexei Tanovitski was the appropriately serious
Prince Gremin, although his bass voice was a bit unstable, and the low notes
might have been blacker.

Valery Gergiev, without doubt the leading conductor of the Russian
repertoire on the world stage, did not disappoint. He led a stately
performance, heavy with basses and cellos. The horns did good work for him. He
delivered all the bon-bon dance numbers with panache. The energy in the pit
never flagged despite some of the boredom on stage.

The team of Deborah Warner (listed as in charge of the production) and Fiona
Shaw (stage director) deserve the blame for this clunker. One could readily
believe The New York Times story that Shaw was rarely around to
actually direct this show, so Netrebko’s shortcomings may not be all her
fault. She and Kwiecien seem to have been left to their own dramatic instincts.

The lesson here is that when you have a splendid, beloved production of an
opera such as Eugene Onegin, keep it. Spend your money elsewhere. It
doesn’t grow on birch trees.

David Rubin

This review first appeared at CNY Café Momus. It is reprinted with the permission of the author.